Lessons learned from vehicle collision accident of Dongguofenli Bridge: FE modeling and analysis

On May 5, 2019, a truck-tractor-trailer loaded with six coils of steel crashed into a pier column of the Dongguofenli Bridge located on the Yongjin Highway in Shengzhou, China, resulting in severe damage to the impacted pier column. Prior studies on heavy truck collision with bridge piers mainly based on finite element (FE) simulations. However, none of them examined the behavior of bridges under a real vehicle-bridge collision accident. To fill in this gap, this paper aims to reproduce the Dongguofenli Bridge vehicle collision accident and scrutinize the causes of the observed bridge damages. This is achieved by using the high-resolution simulation models for both the impacted bridge structures and the colliding heavy truck. The typical heavy truck model widely used in previous studies was employed and validated based on the experimental data. Four different methods were examined to reasonably capture the soil-pile interaction behavior during vehicle collisions. Important lessons were learned from the FE simulation that reproduced this accident: 1) the characteristics of the cargo (i.e., cargo type and cargo’s fixing method) play an important role in determining the response of the bridge and 2) the damage that occurred to the bridge pier is most likely attributed to the direct impact between the bridge and the cargo (steel coils) that slipped off the truck. The analysis results also revealed that using the state-of-practice method for defining the impact force may lead to an unconservative bridge design for vehicle impact resistance. The applicability of the bridge design provisions related to vehicle impact design was also examined and the code-prescribed vehicle collision load was found to be inadequate to produce the damages that are observed in either the high-resolution simulation results or the real collision accident.